“Dear @MumbaiPolice @CPMumbaiPolice pl look into this matter as this handle is using photoshopped screenshots under my handle.” Bollywood filmmaker and Right-Wing activist Vivek Agnihotri tweeted his complaint to Mumbai police on March 9.
He marked his tweet to comedian Tanmay Bhat, with a link to another tweet which had a reference to television anchor Arnab Goswami along with screenshots of what appeared to be older tweets by Agnihotri.
Agnihotri went on to make several seemingly desperate appeals to Mumbai police.
Agnihotri claimed the screenshot was a photoshopped image, while others on Twitter claimed these to be screenshots of his deleted tweets.
Unfortunately for Agnihotri, it turned out that the tweets he claimed were photoshopped had been archived at web.archive.org and can be viewed here.
Twitter user Md Asif Khan pulled out a series of other older tweets by Agnihotri as well.
It seemed clear that the tweets that Agnihotri claimed were photoshopped/forged while complaining to Mumbai police had in fact been tweeted by him – or, at the least, from his account. Some of those tweets were deleted (but available on web archives), others were still available on his Twitter timeline.
Alt News decided to also tweet to the Mumbai Police Twitter handle with a collection of tweets by Agnihotri targeting Goswami, along with the archived links for individual tweets to counter any possible claims of those being photoshopped.
It is possible that Agnihotri’s views about Goswami have undergone a sea change in recent times and he felt the need to delete his old tweets. But complaining about those very tweets as being photoshopped goes beyond wasting Mumbai police’s time. A frivolous and false complaint about several Twitter users raises serious questions about Agnihotri’s credibility. As they say, the internet never forgets.
A version of this article first appeared on Alt News.
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